An Australian suffragist has received pride of place as today's Google doodle.
Henrietta Augusta Dugdale wrote a letter published in the Melbourne Argus exactly 148 years ago (on April 13, 1869), which called for equal justice for women.
Writing regarding a bill that claimed to secure women's rights to property, she described the proposed legislation as a "piece of the grossest injustice" arguing it was only a "partial remedy for a great and crying evil".
It is believed the letter was the first time an Australian woman had publicly called for gender equality.
After moving to Melbourne from London in 1852, Dugdale became an active member of the city's Eclectoc Society and the Australasian Secular Association. Alongside Annie Lowe, she formed the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society. The Society's platform was "to obtain the same political privileges for women as now possessed by male voters", according to the National Library of Australia.
In 1883, her feminist utopian novel, A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age, was published. The booklet envisaged a future world in which men and women were equal, and is available on Wikimedia Commons.
In 1884, Dugdale wrote a letter to the Melbourne Herald expressing disdain with the courts' treatment of an issue still close at heart to the plight of the country's feminists today: women as the victims of violent crimes.
"Women's anger was compounded by the fact that those who inflicted violence upon women had a share in making the laws while their victims did not," she wrote.
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